The document provides 19 marketing tips for retailers to optimize their holiday marketing programs, including capturing email subscribers, managing expectations with welcome emails, making informed frequency decisions, offering unsubscribe preferences, syncing with other departments, cleaning customer data, testing templates, creating cart abandonment campaigns, optimizing transactional emails, creating educational videos, and having a post-purchase email strategy. Retail holiday sales are expected to increase 4% in 2019 compared to 2.1% growth in 2018, making the holiday season critical for many retailers.

1. 2019 Holiday
Marketing Tips
October 2019

2. The NRF predicts retail holiday sales will increase about
4% in 2019, higher than the 3.7% average over the last five
years and nearly double 2018 retail holiday sales which
were up 2.1%. For many companies the holiday season can
comprise as much as 30% of annual revenues making the
holiday season critical for most retail and ecommerce
brands.
Ensuring your holiday marketing program has maximum
success requires significant advance planning and
preparation, flawless execution during the season, and
strategic follow-up programs after the holidays.
Don't wait until Black Friday to flip the switch. Use the
following tips and checklist to guide your planning and
help tune up your program before, during, and after
holiday shoppers start flocking to your site.
1. Make subscribing to your email program quick and
easy.
The holiday shopping season is one of your best sources of
new email subscribers. Take full advantage of all paid and
organic search traffic by being sure that every high traffic
page on your site has a benefit-driven email opt-in form or
a lightbox opt-in form.
Capturing email addresses and driving new account
registrations not only enables regular communications
with prospective customers throughout the holidays, but
also enables remarketing messages such as browse and
cart abandonment emails. It further increases the
likelihood you will have permission to market to new
customers after they purchase as some customers may not
opt-in to marketing messages during the checkout
process.
2. Manage expectations with a holiday-themed welcome
email program.
Shoppers who visit your site during the holiday season
often have different interests, motivations or concerns.
Substitute your regular welcome email during the holiday
season with one that includes information on:
A click-based survey that tells you a little bit more about
your customer to help keep content and offers as relevant
as possible
Email frequency, if you plan to increase it during the
holiday season.

3. Frequency options or “snooze” functionality which
subscribers can manage from your communications
preference center.
Shipping promotions and schedules, how to return items,
gift-card promotions, store and call-center hours, gift
wrapping, mobile ordering, ship to store, and other
holiday-centric concerns.
3. Make informed frequency/cadence decisions.
Almost all retailers ramp up email, SMS and mobile push
notification frequency during the holiday season. This is a
double-edged sword: You will generate additional
conversions and revenue, but higher frequency usually
also drives higher list churn through increased
unsubscribes/opt outs, spam complaints and inactivity.
This can drive up your acquisition costs and reduce
deliverability, both of which eat away at program revenue.
It's important to find the right balance: the frequency that
helps you achieve your business goals without alienating
customers.
Review your message metrics from last year and see if you
can find the tipping point, where you had solid revenue
gains without significantly increasing spam complaints and
opt outs. Use this information to find the right cadence
and also to fend off repeated requests from management
to "just send more email."
Secondly, implement a scoring model that pairs activity
across channels (ex. email + web) that helps include those
who really might be valuable shoppers but are pickier
about which emails they open.
4. Offer an unsubscribe preference center.
You can expect that a number of people will want to opt
out of your messages during the holidays, primarily from
an increase in frequency.
Make it easy for people to opt out, but also make it easy
for them to stay by driving them to a combination
unsubscribe/preference center. These hybrid pages enable
the subscriber to reduce frequency, change lists, switch
channels, update interests – or opt out if they want to.

4. 5. Sync up with other departments.
All departments that touch your ecommerce platform and
process – customer support/call centers, IT, marketing,
merchandising, etc. – must prepare for the holiday crush
to resolve challenges problems or head them off before
they affect shoppers.
The last thing you want is to create marketing campaigns
(email, social, mobile push, web) that are so successful
they overwhelm servers and shut down your Web site.
Forecast traffic patterns and volume (using previous
holiday’s data and your most successful historical
campaigns) for your biggest campaigns and make sure all
departments are in the loop and are able to support peak
response volume.
For email, make sure that your sending infrastructure,
especially IP addresses, are aligned with your planned
sending volumes.
6. Get your customer data together and be sure
integrations work correctly.
Data-driven marketing campaigns are more successful on
the whole than simple broadcast and generic messages,
but they require planning and testing to be sure they work.
Ask yourself and your partners these questions:
• What data do I need to deliver targeted or behavior-
triggered messages?
• Do I have that data now?
• If I don't have it, how can I collect it?
• Is the data clean? (i.e. in a format I can leverage in my
email, mobile and website content accurately and at
scale)?
• Is this data integrated with my email and marketing
databases so I can act on it in real time?
• Have we tested third-party data integrations from our
ecommerce system, web analytics program or
personalization programs like review and
recommendations?
7. Conduct database hygiene now and throughout the
shopping season.
For email, make sure that your bounce processing and
suppression lists are working correctly. During the holiday

5. rush, consider suppressing long-time inactives to lessen
the chance you could get dinged by ISPs for sending to
dormant address or possible "honeypot" spam traps.
This is also the time to reach out to your inactive
subscribers and try to re-engage them before the shopping
season begins. Use surveys, drive them to update their
preferences and test different types of creative and offers
to see if you can reengage these subscribers.
8. Tune up your email sending processes to optimize
deliverability.
Increased frequency during the holiday season can take a
toll on your sender reputation through increased spam
complaints and throttled delivery at peak times. Now is
the time to do everything you can to burnish your sender
reputation with the ISPs:
Authenticate your outbound email using the standard
protocols (DKIM, DomainKeys, SenderID, SPF).
Check blacklists to be sure your IP addresses are not
featured on the most important ones, such as Spamhaus.
Test your message templates for broken or nonstandard
coding, for content many ISPs would associate with spam
and other issues that would make your messages
vulnerable to blocking or filtering to the spam folder.
Consider adding an unsubscribe link or option to "opt
down" in frequency at the top of your messages during
your higher-frequency campaigns.
9. Test message templates and site content and
optimize for rendering, navigation and message
appearance.
Midseason changes in your message templates can be
devastating if you don't rigorously test them. Use the
relatively quieter period before the holiday season
launches to redesign (as needed) your message templates,
including transactional and triggered messages. Consider
these variables:
Format/Layout: If you haven't already optimized layout,
test different design approaches now to ensure additional
incremental lifts in conversion.
Pre-header copy: Test whether adding a call to action in
the top line of your message, so it's seen even with images
blocked and in inbox snippets, preview panes and mobile

6. devices, can generate a lift in conversions, as some
retailers have discovered.
Mobile rendering: Does your message render properly
across all mobile device types and operating systems,
especially Apple Mail and Gmail?
Spam filtering: Run your templates through your email
solution’s spam checker, which predicts whether your
content will trigger ISP spam filters.
10. Nail down your testing approach.
Testing copy, design and offers is a necessary approach for
successful campaigns. Complete your basic testing on
elements such as subject line approaches and sending
day/time before launching your first holiday campaign.
During the season if you are going to test key offers in
email, push and SMS messages, make sure you allot
enough time in your campaign schedule to achieve
confidence in your test results and still deliver full
campaigns on time.
11. Set up your journey and struggle analytics tools to
uncover anomalies and customer experience challenges.
A coupon code that doesn’t render correctly on a specific
mobile device, payments not processing, hard to find call
to action buttons are common issues that can significantly
reduce holiday conversions.
If your company uses tools that analyze customer journeys
and struggles (anomalies), make sure you have real-time
access to them to uncover customer experience issues
impacting revenue. Secondly, use these tools to discover
paths and content that are producing higher than normal
conversions. Finally, ahead of the holidays, do your own
testing across device and payment types to uncover
potential common issues in the purchase process.
12. Understand which digital channels are key to your
holiday success (web, email, social, mobile).
Leverage your data science team or analytics tools and
data to understand which channels were most successful
for you in previous holiday seasons and by
segment/demographic and product type. Also, analyze
your customer journeys to determine which channels and
paths lead to higher cart values versus time to conversion.
As you get closer to Christmas, for example, you might
tweak channel mix and site content to optimize for quicker

7. conversion paths and times.
13. Create and manage content in a way that can be
easily reused across channels.
Leverage content as much as possible that can be used or
tweaked across multiple channels. This approach helps
your overtaxed marketing and content teams keep up with
the pace of holiday campaigns, especially during peak
periods. Identify in advance how content used across
channels will have consistent messaging, but also the
appropriate tone and personality for each channel.
14. Organize and tag holiday content assets.
Make sure you tag content and assets so they can be easily
found by designers and content producers. Also make sure
you have all of your holiday-related product and seasonal
images secured and optimized for use across multiple
channels.
15. Create or enhance cart-abandonment and browse
campaigns.
Cart abandonment is a significant challenge, especially
during the holiday season when so much is at risk.
Shoppers will turn your carts into wish lists, parking items
in there and then leaving the site. A timely email reminder
will bring many of them back to complete checkout
instead of going to a competitor.
• Optimize your cart/browse abandonment program now,
considering these best practices:
• Create a multi-email series, for example, sending the
first message within a few hours after abandonment, the
second 2-3 days later and the third a week or so later.
• Refrain from offering incentives in the first message, but
add them in ensuing messages as needed to increase
conversions. Of course, test, test, test.
• Adopt a service tone, asking if the shopper had a
problem at checkout. Better yet, leverage struggle
analytics data to uncover specific reasons causing
abandonment and personalize messages accordingly.
• Offer to complete the transaction in other channels,
such as through live chat or a call center.

8. 16. Optimize transactional emails.
These highly relevant messages can do more than confirm
purchases or shipping schedules. If you haven't already,
move to a system that allows you to create well-branded
HTML messages, which you can track and to which you can
add dynamic content such as recommendations to
encourage cross-selling and upselling.
Keep the main focus on the transaction, in order to comply
with anti-spam legislation. However, you're leaving
revenue on the table if you don't use transactional
messages to add relevant marketing content and reinforce
your brand and value proposition.
17. Create holiday-oriented educational videos.
Past and new holiday customers typically have many
questions when considering a purchase. From general
questions around return, gift card, and shipping policies to
product specific information usage tips. Consider creating
short videos to answer basic holiday shopping questions
and to help convince shoppers to make specific product
purchases by giving them confidence that they are the
perfect gift solution.
18. Have a mistake-management plan in place.
Assume that something unfortunate could happen at the
worst possible time: a message goes out with the wrong
subject line, link, landing page, offer or images; you
accidentally send to your suppression list.
Avoid panic and down time by mapping out a strategy and
creating an email template that you can customize to deal
with the problem. Get other departments together – IT,
customer support, etc. – to work out a notification and
action plan to minimize disruptions.
19. Create a post-purchase email strategy.
Your email program should expand beyond the purchase
process and holidays to the following year and working to
turn new customers into loyal shoppers.
Create a series of triggered or targeted messages that
reflect customer activity and preferences and that will
keep your email program fresh after the holiday purchases.
These give you a reason to reach out to your customer with
messages that go beyond "buy-buy-buy:"

9. • Post-purchase survey on the product and shopping
experience
• Invitation to complete preferences
• Loyalty incentives or programs
• Invitation to review the purchased items, and review
post notifications
• Recommendations based on purchases or preferences
• Bounceback offers
• Win-back programs for customers before they go
inactive
• Birthday and purchase anniversary
Your immediate focus is on the next few months, but
everything you do now will reverberate long into the next
year. You are either bringing in floods of new customers or
turning lurkers into shoppers again. How will you retain
these motivated shoppers months or years into the future?
About Acoustic
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